The New Public Art: Collectivity and Activism in Mexico since the 1980s

By Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra

Essays on the rise of community-focused art projects and anti-monuments in Mexico since the 1980s.

Mexico has long been lauded and studied for its post-revolutionary public art, but recent artistic practices have raised questions about how public art is created and for whom it is intended. In The New Public Art, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, together with a number of scholars, artists, and activists, looks at the rise of community-focused art projects, from collective cinema to off-stage dance and theatre, and the creation of anti-monuments that have redefined what public art is and how people have engaged with it across the country since the 1980s.

The New Public Art investigates the reemergence of collective practices in response to privatization, individualism, and alienating violence. Focusing on the intersection of art, politics, and notions of public participation and belonging, contributors argue that a new, non-state-led understanding of "the public" came into being in Mexico between the mid-1980s and the late 2010s. During this period, community-based public art bore witness to the human costs of abuses of state and economic power while proposing alternative forms of artistic creation, activism, and cultural organization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781477328859

Book preview

Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture

The New Public Art

Collectivity and Activism in Mexico since the 1980s

EDITED BY

Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra

University of Texas Press

AUSTIN

In loving memory of Erica Segre

Copyright © 2023 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First edition, 2023

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Polgovsky Ezcurra, Mara, editor, contributor.

Title: The new public art : collectivity and activism in Mexico since the 1970s / edited by Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra.

Other titles: Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2023. | Series: Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022062237 (print) | LCCN 2022062238 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2762-3 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4773-2763-0 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-4773-2885-9 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Community arts projects—Mexico. | Artists and community—Mexico. | Public art—Mexico. | Group work in art—Mexico. | Art and social action—Mexico. | Art—Political aspects—Mexico. | Artists—Political activity—Mexico.

Classification: LCC NX180.A77 N49 2023 (print) | LCC NX180.A77 (ebook) | DDC 701/.030972—dc23/eng/20230503

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022062237

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022062238

doi:10.7560/327623

Contents

INTRODUCTION: Agoraphilia: Notes on the Possibility of the Public

Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra

NEW MURALISMS

CHAPTER 1: New Muralisms after Muralism

Natalia de la Rosa and Julio García Murillo

DOSSIER A: Grupo Germen

CHAPTER 2: Public, Political, and Aesthetic Spaces in Ayotzinapa

Ana Torres

DOSSIER B: Campamento Audiovisual Itinerante (CAI)

FEMINIST PUBLICS

CHAPTER 3: Politics of Enunciation and Affect in an Age of Corporeal Violence Mónica Mayer’s The Clothesline and Pinto mi Raya’s Embraces

Karen Cordero Reiman

DOSSIER C: Colectivo A.M.

CHAPTER 4: Performative Resurrections: Necropublics and the Work of Guadalupe García-Vásquez

Erin L. McCutcheon

DOSSIER D: Teatro Ojo

CHAPTER 5: The Ultimate Witnesses: Listening to Teresa Margolles’s Counterforensic Archive

Carlos Fonseca and Enea Zaramella

DOSSIER E: La Casa de El Hijo del Ahuizote

ANTIMONUMENTS AND THE UNDERCOMMONS

CHAPTER 6: Public Art and the Grammars of Antiracism

Abeyamí Ortega Domínguez and Sarah Abel

DOSSIER F: Aeromoto

CHAPTER 7: Menos Días Aquí and Bordamos por la Paz: Grief, Social Protest, and Grassroots Memorialization in Mexico’s War on Drugs

Adriana Ortega Orozco

DOSSIER G: Antimonuments: The Brigade for Memory

CHAPTER 8: Conceptualizing the Public: Femicide, Memorialization, and Human Rights Law

Michael R. Orwicz and Robin Adèle Greeley

MIGRANT POETICS AND CAPITALIST LANDSCAPES

CHAPTER 9: On Affordable Housing: Reflections on the (A)political Evolution of the Territory

Arturo Ortiz-Struck

DOSSIER H: Brigada Tlayacapan

CHAPTER 10: Polvo/Polvoriento/Polvareda: The Poetics of Dust, Dissent, and Migration

Erica Segre

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

Agoraphilia

Notes on the Possibility of the Public

Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra

On September 19, 2017, exactly thirty-two years from the day in 1985 when Mexico City suffered an earthquake that killed between 3,000 and 20,000 people, a seemingly inexplicable geological coincidence led to another seismic catastrophe. At 1:14 p.m., just over two hours after a loud siren had signaled a citywide drill to commemorate the 1985 event, the same terrifying hum was heard again. Was this a glitch? many of us wondered, with our characteristic distrust of state infrastructures and government planning. The piercing noise of shattering windows brought with it the harrowing realization that a tragedy was happening before our eyes, in real time, on the same day that so many of us already remembered with so much sorrow. In the hours of chaos and confusion that followed, those living in the affected areas—which extended beyond Mexico City into the states of Puebla, Morelos, Oaxaca, and Chiapas—experienced a flux of overwhelming and conflicted feelings, from disbelief to paralysis, from fear to courage and solidarity. As telephone lines reached capacity and children left their schools in tears, thousands of us rushed to our homes amid a sea of cars to find out whether our relatives were alive and our homes still standing. I vividly recall my walk in the midday sun, turning left and right in search of those contours of the city that had vanished. The air carried a strange type of dust, possibly emanating from the rubble. It threw everything out of focus. The sound of ambulances became equally pervasive and seemed to travel in all directions. The sky was populated with helicopters, and the city seemed at once frenetic and close to a standstill. Both fake and real images of the disaster soon began circulating on every available screen at a speed almost synchronized to the pace of the damage, an acceleration ill-suited to the muddled sense of temporality that many of us were feeling. The uncanny return of the memories of 1985 and the almost terrifying symmetry between two September 19s unleashed a puzzling feeling of historical repetition in a country arduously struggling to leave behind a sticky past, a past heavily reliant on the century-old symbols and heroic narratives of the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the seventy-year-long authoritarian regime that had followed.¹

As night fell, my mother, sister, and I, having earlier celebrated finding one another alive, headed to one of the affected sites in Colonia del Valle to offer help. We didn’t have a specific address but knew that several buildings had suffered severe damage in the area, some had collapsed, and the number of victims remained unknown. Upon arriving at the first site, we quickly understood that fellow volunteers had little information and that communication was difficult and confusing. The only message we could grasp was that the site was overcrowded and no more help was needed; indeed, the presence of so many people visibly obstructed the movements of rescue teams, ambulances, and rubble trucks. We headed instead to a nearby shelter set up by volunteers in a private school. Here my sister, a medic, was called forward, and I was asked to sort medicines and food. The place was overflowing with first-aid kits, fresh and packed food, clean water, blankets, and people willing to offer help. The zeal and commitment of all those present were exhilarating, but there was also a general sense of chaos.

Contrary to what we might have imagined in an era that is often characterized as one of increasing apathy and individualism, the collective response to the tragedy exceeded the capacity of the damaged sites to receive aid. Only hours after the initial shock, thousands of people unwilling to leave the rescue efforts in the hands of the government found ways to reorganize the entire dynamics of the city and of social networks around what seemed like a single set of shared values: the defense of victims’ lives and the possibility of assuaging their losses. Those of us who worked in shelters witnessed an outpouring of aid donated by individuals and families, rich and poor. At the damaged sites, those who worked on the direct removal of the rubble recall that they found themselves shoulder to shoulder with persons from all classes and ethnicities. Together, as Luis Villoro writes in his poem El puño en alto (The Raised Fist), we began to create a new language for collective action, one in which the raised fist, usually a symbol of protest and resistance, became a call for collective silence,² for only silence would allow the cries of the victims to be heard. Human chains, human belts, human hugs thus became the cogs of a new kind of social machinery in which emergency led the way to solidarity. The tragedy necessitated that we act as embodied beings capable of giving flesh to a larger body, one able to offer care and create the conditions for shelter.

In the days that followed the earthquake, fatigue kicked in, yet many kept their fists firmly aloft so as to continue listening to those left most vulnerable, insisting that the salvage efforts should not cease before all those who could be rescued had been. The newly formed networks of exchange, communication, and participation held fast, yielding a sense of common cause. Many of us began to feel that the seemingly old or dated notion of the public, much battered, on the one hand, by authoritarian uses of the term and, on the other, by the fiercely privatizing logics of the neoliberal market, could, once again, be resurrected and reimagined. Yet those days of pervasive uncertainty also raised innumerable questions about what we may consider to be public and made visible the many challenges that come with every act of commoning.³ During the catastrophe and its aftermath, the idea of the public was continually embodied and disembodied, performed and undone in rapid bursts of emotion, followed by bafflement, confusion, and disagreement, then by excitement and optimism once again. How long would this sense of collective care last, and what would its limits be? Would the new public equally serve the haves and the have-nots, those living in Mexico City and those living in the poorer, bordering states? Which victims would be rescued and comforted first, and why? Whose stories would become more visible? The passing of days saw much of the donated food going to waste, medical supplies being piled up and stored (rather than distributed), and goods being taken from affected homes by unaccountable officials and petty criminals. The altruistic and caring public that had formed soon learned the bitter lesson that goodwill would not suffice to save the lives of those trapped in the rubble or provide shelter to those left homeless. News arrived that more-isolated communities had received scarcely any aid, while richer neighborhoods were overflowing with clear water and other basic goods they did not need.⁴ The stories of the latter were being overrepresented in the media, while those of the former remained uncommunicated and largely out of sight. This series of questions and paradoxes revolving around the notion of the public, together with its temporalities, dynamics, and imaginaries, motivate The New Public Art. The book takes art as a sphere in which new meanings of the public are not just symbolically represented but also lived, enacted, and brought to life.

Some of the sites most visibly affected by both the 1985 and the 2017 earthquakes had historically been considered public spaces while also being closely associated with the nationalist iconography of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) regime. The PRI was born in the aftermath of the ten-year revolutionary struggle that set the constitutional foundations of political and civil life in Mexico during the twentieth century. Having ruled the entire country during most of that period, through a clientelist system whereby citizens’ votes were effectively exchanged for political favors, the party was ousted from the presidency in 2000, only to return, partially transformed, in 2012–2018. The infrastructural damage Mexico City suffered in 1985 may thus be seen as an allegory for the impending demise of the PRI-led postrevolutionary project and the accompanying ideas of public space, public art, and public participation it had shaped. The fifteen-story Nuevo León building in the landmark social housing unit of Nonoalco Tlatelolco, designed by the modernist architect Mario Pani, cataclysmically collapsed, as well as two major towers in the General Hospital, including the gynecological section, with more than a hundred newborn babies inside, only seven of whom survived. A census of the city’s extensive network of public murals, many of which dated back to the immediate aftermath of the revolution, found that out of 550 murals, 95 had damages of some type, ranging from small cracks to total destruction.⁵ If the iconic murals by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco housed at the grandiose Bellas Artes Palace seemed intact after the earthquake, a number of murals in public hospitals and social housing units suffered a different fate. Carlos Mérida’s Leyendas mexicanas (Mexican legends: 1950–1952), a series of architectural plates built into the stairways of Mario Pani’s Benito Juárez social housing unit in the Roma neighborhood, survived only as the décor of a building facing imminent demolition.⁶ After chiseling the plates from the walls was deemed too dangerous and the proposal to leave the stairways standing as monuments—to surely become the ciphers of an increasingly void social revolutionary discourse—was abandoned, Mérida’s mural cycle was left to suffer the effects of dynamite and was never reconstructed elsewhere.

Though there was little choice to proceed otherwise to salvage the pieces, their eventual destruction was partly the consequence of years of neglecting Mérida’s public artworks, arguably as a result of his estrangement from official ideas of nationalism.⁷ Furthermore, state commissions for such monumental works had become rare, and as Robin Adèle Greeley suggests, the old murals had gradually been drained of their sociopolitical meaning and transformed into patrimony, while the priista discourse of the revolution had itself lost substance.⁸ If, as Greeley adds, Mexican muralism had become not just a conveyor of official ideology but a central player in the country’s public sphere—stirring up agitated debates on the desired relationship between the Mexican state and an ethnically and culturally diverse political body—by the 1970s onward muralism’s message of popular consciousness [had] effectively [been] neutralized. Foreseeing some of the developments we discuss in this book (to which she is also a contributor), Greeley continues: The [public art] adventure of the 1920s and 1930s had ended: it would be left to others outside the institutional reach of the state to express a popular national consciousness.⁹

The 2017 earthquake inflicted similar damage on the symbolic tissue of the urban commons, although on a lesser scale. Moreover, this tremor impacted a society used to perceiving the representations of the 1910 revolution and previous eras as ghosted relics, the meaning of which has been worn away by a culture of image capitalism prone to rapid discard. During the less than two minutes that the earthquake lasted, the cross that had stood for over two hundred years atop the San Juan Bautista church in Coyoacán fell off the main tower, with passers-by (including my father) running to collect its fragments.¹⁰ The imposing Monumento a la Madre (Monument to the Mother), designed in 1949 by the sculptor Luis Ortiz Monasterio and the architect José Villagrán García, which heavily featured the symbolism of mestizaje (miscegenation), was completely ravaged, leaving in its place an empty pedestal surrounded by debris.¹¹ The large-scale architectural complex of the Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Obras Públicas (Ministry of Communication and Public Works, or SCOP), conceived by Carlos Lazo in the early 1950s as a modernist example of integration of painting, sculpture, and architecture, deserves mention too.¹² In this case, the buildings were so heavily damaged that they remain vacant to this day, yet the murals—by Juan O’Gorman, José Chávez Morado, Luis García Robledo, Guillermo Monroy, and Arturo Estrada—that lined their walls were impressively preserved. It seems that Juan O’Gorman’s innovative stone mosaic mural technique enabled such resilience and, in so doing, saved the complex from total collapse.¹³ This was a case, in other words, of public art heroically holding up the country’s debilitated infrastructures. How long this precarious salvation will last remains unclear. At the time of writing this introduction, both the murals and the buildings are still standing, but the government has decided to transfer the murals to a new location, purportedly to preserve them.¹⁴ The iconic complex of modernist buildings to which the murals belonged is unlikely to survive, a situation that ultimately symbolizes the uncertainty that historic public artworks and public spaces face today. Many of the country’s major twentieth-century public projects were spearheaded precisely from the SCOP’s headquarters. Its imminent disappearance thus raises the question of whether the 2017 earthquake delivered a coup de grâce to the symbolic armature sustaining the notions of the people and the public in postrevolutionary Mexico, turning its old landmarks into cracked, transposed, and simulacral relics. This question underpins the pertinence and urgency of this book.

In The New Public Art, scholars and artists, writing as individuals, pairs, and collectives, explore practices and narratives organized around a desire for art to have a tangible public impact. In each of the case studies that follow, however, visions of artistic processes and approaches to community and participation are markedly different from those that characterize historical understandings of public art in Mexico. Through a combination of scholarly chapters and a series of dossiers (or statements) written by artists and artists’ collectives, the premise of this book is that a new, non-state-led understanding of the public came into being in Mexico during the temporal arc roughly traced by these two major earthquakes, from the mid-1980s to the late 2010s.

Carlos Monsiváis identified the 1985 earthquake as the moment in which civil society first emerged in Mexico as an organizing idea for civil opposition to the PRI regime. After the earthquake, and in response to the many government failures during the tragedy, Monsiváis writes that hundreds of thousands of people drew a new relationship with the government, moving away from the melancholic expectation of a solution into the search for these solutions.¹⁵ This collective transformation in the relationship between the citizenry and the state entailed reclaiming an idea of the public good that was different from official versions. Moreover, it gave rise to spatial, symbolic, discursive, and embodied forms of participation able to create and sustain this good. The public response to the 2017 earthquake and its aftermath was as much a reenactment of citizens’ involvement in the rescue efforts thirty years prior as it was an attempt to overcome past failings, giving new corporealities and new names to collective problems and common ideals, and generating spaces for public participation aimed not so much toward consensus as toward nonviolent disagreement, debate, and caring dissent.

The New Public Art roughly spans the period from what Monsiváis calls the birth of this civil society in 1985 to the emergence of a dense amalgam of grassroots projects contributing to the reconstruction efforts in 2017. The latter proliferated in the midst of a large-scale security crisis unleashed by former president Felipe Calderón’s so-called war on drugs (2006–2012), the dire (necropolitical) consequences of which feature heavily in the following chapters. The 2017 earthquake also arrived in the aftermath of more than three decades of structural reforms and neoliberal transformations of the economy and society that heavily defunded social services and left entire areas of the country exposed to the exploitative dynamics of corporate extractivism and what Sayak Valencia calls gore capitalism.¹⁶ As the chapters that constitute The New Public Art suggest, during this arduous thirty-year period, a fundamental reconfiguration of the meanings of the public and practices of commoning has taken place in Mexico, yet past desires and imaginaries associated with such ideals have often also reemerged. The eerie occurrence of both earthquakes on September 19 and the mass public involvement that ensued on both occasions serve here to allegorize the cyclical constitution, disappearance, and reappearance of publics and counterpublics.¹⁷ These phenomena also remind us of the significance that historical memory plays in such processes.

In his seminal book Publics and Counterpublics, Michael Warner describes publics as queer creatures. He adds, You cannot point to them, count them, or look them in the eye.¹⁸ Publics are elusive because they entail a connection among strangers, creating shared spheres of belonging beyond kin or nation. They are a kind of fiction that has taken on life, and a very potent life at that, writes Warner.¹⁹ Rather than existing as stable, measurable entities, they are constantly appearing and disappearing, mutating, expanding, falling into oblivion, returning from the past. They have a circular relationship with the discourses and practices that shape them: while publics are shaped by discourse, discourses also attend and respond to the concerns and desires of their imagined publics.²⁰ The New Public Art takes its cue from Warner’s queering of the notion of the public to account for the recent history of public art and public spaces in Mexico. Exploring practices that often interweave private and collective experiences, as well as artworks and discourses emerging in peripheral and interstitial spaces, the authors’ collective intention is to move beyond the standardized and limited understanding of public art as state-sponsored art and public spaces as spaces accessible to everyone. In a context characterized by escalating levels of violence, mass-scale femicide, homicide, and disappearance, The New Public Art bears witness to the proliferation of antimonuments, grassroots memorials, dissident murals, ephemeral street dances, independent archives and libraries, and feminist and queer installations that embody and perform rapidly changing ideas of the public, publics, public art, public space, counterpublics, necropublics, commons, and undercommons. These heterogeneous practices attest to a complex remodeling of the relationship between art and that which is common, collective, public, and assembled. As we seek to show, these practices embrace relationality and community building as ethical horizons, expressed through site-specific attempts to weave closer connections between art and place. Moreover, artists’ collectives involved in human rights work have blurred distinctions between art and activism, working with communities and victims of state violence to create nonofficial spaces of remembrance and memorialization. And though new public art has established critical dialogues with previous understandings of public art in the country, its approach to the heroic and nationalist narratives of the Mexican Revolution has aimed at debunking such myths.

The dismantling of the so-called public sector in Mexico dates back to at least the early 1980s, when a ferocious neoliberal economic model was introduced by the enfeebled PRI regime. This left the country’s precarious democratic structures vulnerable to the greedy interventions of a corporate and extractivist private sector. The neoliberal undoing of the postrevolutionary state was accompanied by the rapid privatization of public spaces, now transformed into shopping malls or lucrative and hard-to-access housing complexes.²¹ What Wendy Brown describes as neoliberal reason has encroached as a new political moral, reconfiguring most aspects of existence in economic terms and quietly undoing vocabularies, principles of justice, political cultures, habits of citizenship, practices of rule, and above all, democratic imaginaries.²² One of the old democratic imaginaries under attack is that of the public itself, as the large-scale privatization of public goods has made us all too aware of the potential perils of public enterprises and the exclusionary dynamics of public spaces. A collective feeling of agoraphobia driven by financial interest, accompanied by pervasive insecurity and violence, has arguably emerged as Mexico’s new normal since the country’s structurally disadvantaged entry into the global markets. How has public art changed, and what has it come to signify under these conditions? How have new dissensual spaces been shaped? How have artist collectives responded to human rights violations, state-imposed public memorials, and the proliferation of drug-related violence in outdoor spaces? In what ways have artists and activists reimagined spheres of collective creation and shared struggle?

What Is Public Art?

Any attempt at newly defining public art in the early twenty-first century would at best be naïve. The history of this notion is long, momentous, and complex. Yet the task is also indispensable for apprehending art’s current imprint on the social and vice versa. If all art is made for a public, the concept of public art entails a surplus or an excess in this fundamental relationship. One of this book’s claims is that understanding this excess requires shifting our attention from the presence or absence of public funding to a foregrounding, instead, of the role of artistic practices in everyday forms of social organization, often on the margins of the state. In other words, public art may fall below or outside established political projects or institutions and encompass practices seeking not only to critique a certain regime of aesthetic or political representation but also to articulate new ways of inhabiting spaces, relating to and affecting others, and perceiving or creating spheres of belonging.

The term public art has all too frequently been used without sufficient critical investigation. Lucy Lippard argues that not all the varied . . . forms that have come to be called ‘public art’ deserve the name.²³ The usual association of public art with state commissions places narrow emphasis on matters of funding and ownership, thus failing to say anything about the art itself and the individuals or communities involved in its making. The history of state involvement in the arts to promote political agendas has similarly reduced public art in the eyes of a number of scholars to being a sheer bearer of state ideology, the opposite of what participatory and dissensual practices could yield.²⁴ Though the authors in this volume carefully consider the significance of the state’s current and past involvement in the making of art and in defining its meaning and purpose, we problematize any top-down approach to the politics and aesthetics of public art in Mexico over the last three to four decades. In other words, the authors of The New Public Art aim to acknowledge critically the history of the state’s use of the arts to further authoritarian agendas while recuperating Lippard’s resistance to relinquishing the notion of public art. This renunciation would not just be a missed opportunity, as she says; it would in itself limit the possibility of public art mattering.

In her investigations on the temporality of public art, Patricia C. Phillips argues that the notion of public may . . . be the most quixotic idea encountered in contemporary culture. The public is invented—and re-created by each generation, she writes, for it is profoundly entwined with the material conditions of social life and the technologies that enable the communication of ideas.²⁵ The mutability of this category necessarily demands a definition of public art that prevents fixity or permanence—such as, for instance, its being tied to the outdoors or to some civil space. As Phillips demonstrates, public art is imbued with the cyclical temporality of the meaning of the public. Its definition must therefore account for that cyclicity by absorbing the quest for the meaning of the public as its fundamental singularity. To put it another way, for Phillips, public art is public because it is a manifestation of art activities and strategies that take the idea of public as the genesis and subject of analysis. It is public because of the kinds of questions it chooses to ask or address and not because of its accessibility or volume of viewers.²⁶ This understanding of public art renders it potentially multiple, generative, and prone to experimentation. Moreover, it situates public art as a fertile ground for political and philosophical reflection, as the chapters of this volume also go on to show.

The philosophical relevance of public art has arguably been insufficiently studied not just in Latin America but also in the United States and Europe. While much has been said about the failures or successes of public art, Phillips writes, little has been written about the philosophical questions a [work of] public art may raise.²⁷ Foremost among these, as she suggests, is the issue of temporality. What are the temporal conditions within which collective meanings emerge and vanish? What processes constitute a collective body or a collective experience and how do they unfold in time? What practices assist democratic creativity over space and time? What trajectories of change do public artworks follow? If public artworks act as performative bodies, producing meaning, subjectivity, and action over time, can artists avoid the perils of obsolescence by privileging historically and geographically situated (ephemeral) interventions? Seeking to address these questions, the authors in The New Public Art stray from a normative approach to defining what is or should be public. Instead, they seek answers in existing practices, analyzing a highly diverse recent history of public art in Mexico that remains underinvestigated and undertheorized. Additionally, they pay homage to and continue the feminist embrace of the notion of public art since the 1980s and celebrate what the art historian Arlene Raven described in 1989 as an explosion of new forms, from street art to guerrilla theatre, video, page art, billboards, protest actions and demonstrations, oral histories, dances, environments, posters, murals, paintings and sculpture.²⁸ As Raven puts it, since the late 1980s, largely thanks to a number of feminist interventions, public art isn’t a hero on a horse anymore.²⁹ The proliferation of forms that was already apparent in the 1980s has accelerated even more in recent years, as understandings of agency have expanded not just from a patriarchal to a feminist vision or from the individual artist to collective action, but from a human-centered approach to the recognition and embrace of an ecological realm in which materials, objects, technologies, and living beings coproduce action. The trajectory of change, as this book attests, has been anything but smooth or linear, having been subject to heated polemic, contestation, conflict, and reversal. Almost every transformation has arguably witnessed the anachronistic return of symbols and gestures from a past that refuses to depart unchanged.³⁰

Working along a similar path toward inclusivity and feminist commitment, in the mid-1990s Lippard broadly defined public art as work of any kind that cares about, challenges, involves, and consults the audience for or with whom it is made, respecting community and environment.³¹ For her, public art is not (or not necessarily) to be looked at. It looks out. Lippard’s list of outlooking art encompasses everything from conventional works for indoor exhibitions that refer to local communities, history or environmental issues to site-specific artworks that significantly engage with communities in their execution, background information, or ongoing function.³² Some of the arguably most original or unexpected examples that she mentions in her extensive list include public-access radio, television, or print media, such as audio- and videotapes, postcards, comics, guides, manuals, artists’ books, and posters, together with performative actions that travel or appear simultaneously in different locations, to highlight or link current issues.³³

Like Raven’s, Lippard’s understanding of public art stands out for considering a variety of unconventional media, most notably artists’ books, mail art, performance, and synchronic pieces, which she calls chain actions. These are all practices in which women artists have been pioneers and protagonists, and Lippard’s own relationship with them grew out of her involvement in the construction of a feminist art history. As she points out, the concerns of public and participatory art are closely tied to the concerns of feminist art, and women have embraced the category of public art more frequently in their writings. Significantly, she adds, both public and feminist art are moved by a desire for art to be useful, though not—or not always—utilitarian.³⁴

An Agoraphilic Vision

Though this is not a book about feminism or feminist art, its conceptual points of departure are the writings by Raven and Lippard in the 1980s and 1990s and a series of contributions emerging from feminist debates on public art, in particular Rosalyn Deutsche’s seminal essay titled Agoraphobia, which I discuss below. Along the lines of Nancy Fraser’s Rethinking the Public Sphere, these thinkers’ shared conviction is that adopting a feminist understanding of public art and public space is particularly telling in the sense that it makes visible the contested and exclusionary character of the notion of the public.³⁵ As they stress, public space has historically been understood in negative terms as falling outside the private realm and thus being fundamentally separate from the feminine space of the home.³⁶ Even as these divisions have been questioned and redrawn, the official rhetoric of publicity continues to create significant exclusions.³⁷ Fraser adds that the boundaries between the private and the public are not naturally given: what will count as a matter of common concern [is] decided . . . through discursive contestation, and she argues that this process is often initiated by subaltern publics.³⁸ The New Public Art takes Fraser’s idea of (subaltern) contestation beyond the realm of discourse into a plurality of fields of experience, visuality, affect, and perception.

A telling entry point into the discussion of how gender has permeated ideas of the public is the history of agoraphobia, understood as a pathological fear of open or public spaces. A medical category that continues to be in use, the agoraphobic condition was first described by the Austrian psychiatrist Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal in 1871, after coming across three male patients who, on approaching "certain large, open public squares (freie Plätze) in Berlin," would experience dizziness, trembling, heart palpitations, and an acute fear of dying.³⁹ Westphal’s neologism is based on the Greek notion of the agora, which describes open public spaces, especially marketplaces, where people gathered and assembled. Westphal’s diagnosis was rapidly popularized in Europe, where, during the turn of the nineteenth century, doctors identified a number of primarily male patients with similar symptoms and attributed the disease to a problem of the liver (Cherchevsky) or the ear (M. Lannois and C. Tournier) . . . insufficient will (Paul Emil Lévy) . . . excessive sex and alcohol (Henry Sutherland) or coffee (Legrand du Salle), among other causes, like fatigue (Emil Cordes) and childbearing (C. W. Suckling).⁴⁰ The early detection of agoraphobia among men did not prevent the disease from being considered fundamentally ‘female’ in character, described as a housewife’s disease by doctors.⁴¹ Freud’s writings represent a poignant example of this gender bias. In a series of letters to the German Jewish otolaryngologist Wilhelm Fliess, written between 1896 and 1899, the founder of psychoanalysis developed a theory of phobias, or anxiety symptoms, which includes a description of agoraphobia in women as dependent on a romance of prostitution and the repression of the intention to take the first man one meets in the street (December 17, 1896). This association of agoraphobia with repressed erotic desire also gained popularity in circulating cultural understandings of this form of fear, and it was used insidiously to stigmatize women. Joanna Bourke points out that a popular textbook in mid-twentieth-century Britain maintained that agoraphobia was a response to the desire to be raped. The agoraphobic was afraid to go outside, believing that she would faint and fall. But that was exactly the position that the agoraphobic unconsciously desired, being attracted to the idea of sexual molestation.⁴²

Contemporary clinical descriptions of agoraphobia avoid gendered listings of symptoms, yet the condition continues to be most commonly diagnosed among women, and this tendency is on the rise. In 1987, Robyn Vines argued that about two-thirds or more of agoraphobics seen by psychiatrists and other health professionals are women,⁴³ and the 2013 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders states that females are twice as likely as males to experience [it].⁴⁴ The agoraphobic condition, which could also be described as the fear of the marketplace, reflects in this sense the extent to which women and minority groups have had to (and continue to) struggle to feel safe in public spaces. The staggering rates of femicide in Mexico and indeed throughout Latin America form part of the insufficiently accounted-for forms of violence that have spread a deathly fear in those spaces theoretically accessible to everyone.⁴⁵

A seeming paradox at the heart of agoraphobia is that it not only involves the fear of finding oneself in crowded spaces but also encompasses the fear of being alone in the street, in parking lots, in marketplaces, on bridges, or anywhere outside the home. In other words, agoraphobia is the fear of being surrounded by too many disconnected people—a crowd, a mob—or facing the city in solitude. In this latter sense, it can be seen as fear of alienation rather than a fear of community. Kathryn Milun describes this duality as immanent to the structure of feeling of the urban commons,⁴⁶ which never just captures an individual condition but reflects a broader fear that circulates in societies. Agoraphobia, in particular, is symptomatic of the ways in which societies facilitate or repress public debate and conceive of inclusivity, participation, safety, and care. Milun tellingly signals that agoraphobia appeared . . . during a period of massive migrations from countryside to city, together with the construction of monumental architectural forms that accompanied both metropolitan growth and the rise of the modern nation-state. Nineteenth-century agoraphobics experienced the gigantic squares and boulevards introduced into their cities as hostile environments. They perceived these monumental spaces as ‘empty,’ and suffered intense anxiety that caused them to retreat to the curb, to their homes, and even to their beds.⁴⁷ While emptiness and monumentalism continue to trigger fear of public spaces, these are not the exclusive and possibly most prevalent sources of agoraphobic feelings in the present. The neoliberal undoing of the demos (to use Wendy Brown’s phrasing⁴⁸), the crumbling of the welfare state, and, in certain cases like Mexico’s, the state’s infiltration by organized crime, alongside pervasive surveillance, biopolitical control, and violence, have jointly triggered new, equally hostile waves of agoraphobia in the past decades, pushing many, once again, to retire to their homes and to their beds—with suicide rates and anxiety rocketing throughout the country.⁴⁹

In discussions about public art, however, the notion of agoraphobia has taken on a more complex and nuanced meaning, shaped by, among others, the writings of the art historian Rosalyn Deutsche. Her book Evictions revisits this concept to analyze the removal of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc from New York City’s Federal Plaza in 1989. She describes what left-wing critics saw as a neoconservative campaign to remove the sculpture from the plaza based on a purported defense of the plaza’s public use and the need of an imagined public to enjoy free access and free circulation within it. During the debate, Deutsche argues, the meaning of the public was assumed to be self-evident, whereas, in reality, the use of the term was imbued with (implied) value judgments. She writes that the public was presumed to be a group of aggregated individuals unified by their adherence to fundamental, objective values or by their possession of essential needs and interests or, what amounts to the same thing, divided by equally essential conflicts.⁵⁰ That understanding of the public as a coherent unity capable of reaching so-called democratic consensus through rational critical discussion dates back to Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). In this influential and polemical book, Habermas construes an ideal type of the bourgeois public sphere, understood as a sphere between society and the state where citizens discuss matters of common concern to hold the state accountable.⁵¹ Yet according to Deutsche, who recuperates the critiques of a number of radical and feminist thinkers, including Fraser, Chantal Mouffe, and Claude Lefort, Habermas’s model primarily generates exclusions—of women, nonwhite subjects, the non-educated, the non-liberal-minded, the more-than-human, and so on—and may thus be paradoxically described as agoraphobic, or fearful of a diverse and agonistic public. In this light, agoraphobics become those